Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday January 01, 2013 @05:45PM
from the don't-try-this-at-home-kids dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Joerg Sprave is at it again. This time, in order to bring in the New Year, he's got something with a bit more bang to it: a firecracker-launching slingshot. Being German, Joerg has built a slingshot that will accommodate the largest legal firecracker in that country. '2 grams of black powder in a tight cardboard "cigar" make a pretty loud bang! In order to make these bangs more spectacular, it is desirable to shoot them as high into the air as possible. A special slingshot crossbow has been designed, chambered for the strongest legal firecrackers. The weapon is a breech loader, and an integrated storm lighter allows the shooter to light the fuse when the weapon is all ready for the shot. The weapon launches the firecracker with tremendous force. The blunt object easily crashes through a moving card board box, and — equipped with a wooden tip — even goes in all the way into a block of ballistic gelatin.' His two videos are available on YouTube: part 1, part 2."
This is the same gentleman who made a slingshot that launches machetes.

Looks more crossbow with alternative non-bolt ammo. Slingshot makes me think of the classic wristrocket. Those and fireworks have gone together like peanut butter and jelly for at least a century or so. The only better use for a slingshot is probably water balloons although you've got to be careful not to rip them apart at launch. As kids we also used balls of crumpled paper both in wrist rockets and potato guns for indoor entertainment. Only occasionally broke a window with that ammo. Sometimes the potato gun would set the paper ball on fire if you used liquid propellant which is either a bonus or a problem depending on situation. So this patentable tech has at least 30 years of prior art, at least that I'm willing to admit to.

Back in the late 60's my older brother had a small bore brass mortar cast for himself at some historical artifact kind of foundry in New England. The bore was exactly the same diameter as the inside of a tennis ball. When "Flag Day" came (does anyone else remember "flag Day?") he decided to make it "Flag Week" and offered to take down and fold the flag for our father every day. I was volunteered to help him out in the folding and taking down part.

I was in Berlin for new years. These things are pretty loud. There were some people a few doors down tossing them out their apartment window on to the street every few seconds for several hours. Every block down the street was like this too. Crazy awesome way to celebrate the new years. It also makes the 4th of July look kinda weak. The only things you can get now in many US states are considered "kids" fireworks here.

You should try Waimanalo on the island of O'ahu. Every family gets ~$3000 worth (yes, that's thousands) of fireworks and lights them off constantly the whole night. The next morning every street is covered in burnt red paper, spent roman candles on the hoods of cars. I've heard a lot of stories about New Years fireworks, but then I experienced it in Waimanalo. Don't bother telling me fireworks are illegal there. I know and they don't care. Here's something from 2010 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6GQq6E [youtube.com]

Compared to what happened for "old and new" in Holland that is lame indeed. Amsterdam is, well, there is no word for what it is like. All I can say is that the streets are 4-8" deep in firecracker wrappers the following morning, and I don't even really remember the firecrackers: especially compared to the "big rockets" going off every second and in every direction from 11 PM to 5 AM the next morning. Even compared to China at Spring festival Amsterdam is incomparable.

not entirely sure why you would need a slingshot to light something that you can usually buy with a rocket attached in any firework shop. just light the rocket and away you go. and as for "easily crashes through a card board box", the UK rockets will blow a hole through a window or blow the exhaust of a car.

I think between movies and Mythbusters my expectations for explosions are entirely out of whack with "common" explosions in reality, or at least what i expect to be shown off in internet videos. Those firecracker explosions were a lot quieter than i was expecting (at least as recorded in the video) and i was hoping to see either the cardboard box or the ballistic gel actually be broken apart by the explosion, but no such luck.

They seemed like the kind of thing that the Mythbusters would get when trying to reproduce the myth. The kind where they'd decide the myth was a failure and then go on and try to replicate the results with progressively larger amounts of explosive. Although given that they almost always end up having to scale things up i guess it makes sense that a "normal" firecracker just isn't that impressive.

Used to mess with m80s as a teenager in Queens, put a lit one down a thick cardboard tube, then a tennis ball, wait for a slow fuse to finally catch then..BOOM! That ball would travel a good football field. These are two or three times the size, about 1/2 a stick of dynamite maybe. Oh those wacky Germans, always vit der vays of violentz! Looks like fun.

This is about right. I'm from the US and used to play with M80s as a kid. When I got to Germany and bought some of these I was thinking they were going to be crazy loud and destructive! Meh, I wasn't that impressed. They are loud but mostly full of clay/dirt. Sure wouldn't want one going off in my hand though!

Right? I wouldn't reccomend doing what I and my friends did to a kid today. Those fuses are 'usually' reliable, but you got some that burned real quick. Phht, boom! If you were too close, too bad, so sad for you. I haven't messed with them in many, many years. And every July 4th I see the news of guys who look in a mortar tube when a slow fuse finally went off, goodbye face. I guess we were lucky not to get too hurt. If you don't have the proper respect for these things, you can get badly damaged, even from

If you watch the slo-mo shot of the explosion inside the gel block, you can see that the explosion blows out the ends of the paper tube, without rupturing the tube itself, which would take a LOT more pressure and make a LOT more noise.

I suspect the the ends of these things are simply crimped shut, rather than sealed with a glued in plug like an M-80. Probably done to limit the power for safety reasons. They also apparently use black powder, rather than the more energetic flash powder used in M-80s. But 2 g

Here in the Netherlands a 12 year old boy was badly burnt by fireworks last night. He was helped by the police, who asked the onlookers to fetch a bucket of cold water for him. No one reacted; the sheep were too busy watching. As a thank you for the performance some lunatics found it necessary to ignite some heavy firecrackers very close to where the police were busy with the boy. Imagine what would have happened if one of those drunken morons would have had one of those firecracker shooters! Many more badly injured people, because those things will be used to see how far you can shoot a 'live' firecracker; not how high. And this time it will be innocent people on the streets who will get injured instead of the morons themselves.

This happened to me. At a concert a few years back, some fucking idiot behind me decided to light off bottle rockets. One landed on my shoulder, went off, blew a chunk of my chin off, and blew out my right ear. I can live with the deafness, but the constant day-in day-out ringing is most irritating. By the time the cops got to me, the fuckers had absconded. BTW, the local Free Clinic, with the help of some volunteer doctors from the local Veterans Hospital, provided first rate care until

In the 70s, I was in High School. A friend and I made our own home-made dynamite from nitroglycerin we also made at home mixed with a home-made aluminum based flash powder. We also made fulminate of mercury (I can still remember the strong apple scented cloud generated in its production.) We'd stick 1 oz, loads with a blasting cap (a glass ampule filled with home-made fulminate with a piece of miners fuse), to the top of an Estes 'E' engine rocket motor with fins attached. The things would go up about 250 f